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That light known, then indeed we are stirred towards those
Beings in longing and rejoicing over the radiance about them,
just as earthly love is not for the material form but for the
Beauty manifested upon it. Every one of those Beings exists for
itself but becomes an object of desire by the colour cast upon it
from The Good, source of those graces and of the love they evoke.
The soul taking that outflow from the divine is stirred; seized
with a Bacchic passion, goaded by these goads, it becomes Love.
Before that, even Intellectual-Principle with all its loveliness
did not stir the soul; for that beauty is dead until it take the
light of The Good, and the soul lies supine, cold to all,
unquickened even to Intellectual-Principle there before it. But
when there enters into it a glow from the divine, it gathers
strength, awakens, spreads true wings, and however urged by its
nearer environing, speeds its buoyant way elsewhere, to something
greater to its memory: so long as there exists anything loftier
than the near, its very nature bears it upwards, lifted by the
giver of that love. Beyond Intellectual-Principle it passes but
beyond The Good it cannot, for nothing stands above That. Let it
remain in Intellectual-Principle and it sees the lovely and
august, but it is not there possessed of all it sought; the face
it sees is beautiful no doubt but not of power to hold its gaze
because lacking in the radiant grace which is the bloom upon
beauty.
Even here we have to recognise that beauty is that which
irradiates symmetry rather than symmetry itself and is that which
truly calls out our love.
Why else is there more of the glory of beauty upon the living and
only some faint trace of it upon the dead, though the face yet
retains all its fulness and symmetry? Why are the most living
portraits the most beautiful, even though the others happen to be
more symmetric? Why is the living ugly more attractive than the
sculptured handsome? It is that the one is more nearly what we
are looking for, and this because there is soul there, because
there is more of the Idea of The Good, because there is some glow
of the light of The Good and this illumination awakens and lifts
the soul and all that goes with it so that the whole man is won
over to goodness, and in the fullest measure stirred to life.
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